GreenPrint, a small startup in Portland, Ore., has an easy answer. GreenPrint, developed by a young former Ford Motor Corp. executive, is able to flag those pages before they print, and make sure they’re something you really want to have in hard copy.

“I worked for Ford a few years ago in Europe, doing innovation stuff, and we had a Costco-sized building that was five stories tall,” says the founder, Hayden Hamilton. “On each floor, there were 25 print stations, and all of them would be overflowing with orphan pages by 10 a.m. each day.”

“I was printing something, and got one of these pages, and I thought, ‘There’s got to be a solution to this,” he said. “I started looking on Cnet’s Download.com and on Google and didn’t find anything.”

“Almost everyone has experienced that final page that’s just a url, or a banner ad, or two pages of legal jargon that they didn’t know would print,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is really an un-met need out there.'”

Hamilton, 30, who lived in San Francisco a few years ago when he worked for the Global Business Network, returned to his hometown of Portland, Ore., and started GreenPrint. He hired California Software Labs, with offices in Pleasanton and Chennai, India, to develop the software.

And GreenPrint was born.

Home users can download a trial version for free, and buy it for $35. (For every purchase, GreenPrint will plant a tree in any name you choose.) The big money will be in selling it to large companies, which can save big bucks in reduced paper and ink costs. The World Bank is using it, and 23 Fortune 500 companies have pilot projects. GreenPrint says big companies can save $2 million a year on paper and ink, as well as save 4,000 trees and cut 12,000 tons of carbon emissions.

I’ve tried it, and I love it. You click print, and a window opens up. GreenPrint highlights any questionable pages in red. You can double-click on the page and print it anyway.

“We added the ability to right-click on any page in print-preview and strip out the images,” Hamilton says. “Just printing Google maps and a banner ad can cost you $1 on an H-P printer in terms of ink.”

(Hamilton said that some of his inspiration came from, of all things, a package of articles on the business of ink that he read in The Chronicle, which I had written with my colleague Carolyn Said. In “Ink, Inc.,” Carolyn wrote about the irony of how the digital age has us using more ink and paper than ever; in a sidebar, “Ink use in computer printers just a drop in the bucket,” I wrote about how, even though ink is everywhere, no one gives it a thought.)

In addition, GreenPrint sells a custom-designed font, Evergreen, that “will maximize the amount of words you put on the page, as well as make it as readable as humanly possible.” It saves more than 15 percent, compared to common fonts like Arial and Times New Roman. The font costs $10, or $5 if bought with the software.

GreenPrint does not have a Mac version, although it expects one by the end of the year.